Without waxing too philosophic, the majority of popular video games, even those without any typically violent content, explore the darker impulse of the id: destruction. This is not limited to the fine purveyors of first-person shooters. Destruction is not limited to the eradication of another human (or alien) life form. Consider for a moment two puzzle games that were recently en vogue: Snood and Bejeweled. In the former, the player wins by clearing the stage of all of the snoods and in the latter, every set formed leads to the annihilation of that jewel set. It may seem odd, but few games focus on the other side of that coin. Today I look back at one of the greatest games of creation in the annals of gaming: SimCity 2000.
First released in 1993 by Maxis, SimCity 2000 was the sequel to the surprise hit SimCity. While the other Sim games, like SimAnt, SimEarth, and SimLife, languished on store shelves, SimCity racked up a collection of awards and was ported to a variety of systems including the SNES. Will Wright, the mastermind behind the game, had clearly hit simulation gold in a game based on the tedium of city planning. As SimCity found the sweet spot in the creation folds of gamers’ brains, a sequel, once all of the side Sims were out of the way, was inevitable.
SimCity 2000 literally added a whole new dimension to the city building process. Shown from a dimetric vie, the maps in SC2K included height and depth in the construction of the city. Players were able to terraform the land, creating their own Nob Hill or a new Grand Canyon. Furthermore, players had to concern themselves with the intricacies of subterranean development in the form of the sewer system and a subway system. Where the previous game took a lot of the customization out of the hands of the player with its rigid block zone structure, SC2K introduced new buildings such as hospitals, libraries, museums, marinas, prisons, schools, stadiums, and zoos.
The level of immersion in the game was incredible. As mayor of the burgeoning city, the player could subscribe to relevant news updates in the form of fictional newspapers that informed the player of opinion polls, new technologies, and problem areas in the city as well as humorous, throwaway anecdotes about the city. The budget was presented to the player at the end of every year, and it gave the obsessive player an opportunity to delve into minutiae of costs in running cities, such as the amount of government funding to allot to hospitals and police stations.
Embedded in the game was a sense of environmental responsibility that elevated the game above other computer gaming fare of the time. Each power plant had certain drawbacks with the most damaging being the coal and oil power plants. The nuclear power plant, while producing less pollution, came with the caveat that it could meltdown one day. The most efficient power plant, of course, is a fusion power plant. Granted, I was young, but SC2K was the first I ever heard of that holy grail of physics research: sustained fusion. That is one of the things the game did best: it provoked questions. It was so deep, so founded in a certain vision of the world, that players could transfer some of the gameplay knowledge into the real world. Although the logistics of the game are far simpler than those of real life, players came to accept the rules of the game as potentially governing aspects of their own world. At least, that was the case for my own impressionable mind.
One cannot discuss the SimCity series without touching on one of the most compelling aspects of the game to many players: disaster. At the beginning of the article, I pointed out that the game, in contrast with many others, is focused on creation. But what’s the fun of building up a giant Lego castle if you don’t later pretend to be a giant and crush those sharp little bricks under your feet? Why bother putting together a jigsaw puzzle if you aren’t going to break it up again at the end? Enter natural disasters: fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, and marauding aliens. If a disaster ever struck a player’s city while he was still constructing it, the site of that twister or fire could inspire terror and fear because the game is, ultimately, about feeling completely in control of tiny universe of people. They’re all the player’s people and until that fateful moment when the player decides, with a mad gleam in his eye, to stomp his foot down on those poor people, the player feels attached to those little opinion polls. As an aside, the scenarios in SC2K, typically focused on specific disasters, are quite well rendered such that, even today, watching the fires race through the virtual Oakland hills, I get a little chill.
Although the game has no true goal, no end point, there is one way to reach resolution in the game: exodous. At the end of the technology cycle, players are able to create vast arcologies, self-contained cities within the city. These elegant structures looked like science fiction creations, and, of course, they were science fiction creations. There were four possible arcologies, each reflecting a certain sociological view of the future. The obelisk arcology seemed domineering and fascist. The launch arcology looked like some sort of ecologists Utopian environment. One of the more clever Easter eggs around is that if a player created a large number of launch arcologies, they would all launch into space triggering an exodous. One can imagine these arcologies going on to found the settlements of Alpha Centauri. I know it’s juvenile, but when I was young, playing this game, I wanted very badly to live in an arcology. The game made it seem possible, and even if it weren’t possible in real life, it was possible in the game, which was almost as good.
By now, I know I’m never going to create the next great city or civilization. I’m probably not going to contribute to the creation of an arcology that blends nature with technology, but in games like SimCity, I’m able to imagine the future. A future in which entropy is constantly being held at bay by the innovation of mankind. I know it’s just a game, but it’s a game of new beginnings and those are the games worth remembering.